SkyGuy,

Yes, with respect to steelhead, the data are generally good enough. Neither catch data nor escapement data are perfect, but they don't have to be. The estimates need only be close enough to offer consistency over time as index values. And they do that. It is different than the world of your industry. If fisheries management required the kind of precision you seem to be alluding to, there would simply be no fishing, anywhere in the world, period. Except maybe Baker Lake; even Lake Washington uses estimates.

But that isn't the point of this exercise. Here we assume the data are, if not perfect, then entirely adequate for the task at hand. The issue is that there are lots of fishermen and only a few fish. And in order to have fishing, angler-fish encounters must be limited to within the allowable impact. You can talk about data quality until you are blue in the face, but the world is going to go on by, and select a fishing management alternative that matches up with the allowable take.

Ondarvr,

The premise of these prospective fisheries is "do no harm." It's obvious that fishing won't make things any better for the resource. It never has, and it sure won't going forward. The object, if we want to fish, is how to go about it without making things worse, meaning limiting take to only those fish over and above the escapement goal when that number is not large and there is approximately zero prospect of it ever becoming large.

Todd,

Yeah, it does seem like co-management has become less than co-equal. As for incidental mortality rate, the issue continues to be muddy. I find the lack of professional interest interesting, but my guess is that it's because CNR fishing is such a small niche market here on the coast where fishing still means killing fish. Fish management without killing fish must be a foreign Rocky Mountain concept still.

It can be fun to flog the fly v gear debate over beer, but it's generally unproductive. The thing about conventional gear fishing is that anglers wanting to be ten-percenters have increasingly gravitated to more efficient and effective methods of garnering hook-and-line angling success. And that becomes the crux of this issue, where, in order to have prospective fishing, angler efficiency has to be reduced. (Fly fishing at least has that going for it.) And fishing from boats has very significantly higher CPUE than fishing from foot, it's an obvious target. Using boats (motor or drift) for access only is probably higher than walk-in access, but I don't know that it would make the kind of difference necessary for PS steelheading.

Sg